Introduction:

The promising nation of Kenya has taken big steps after the creation of its project previously mentioned, Vision 2030, for improving the ease of doing business and governance issues. Company legislation is up to date after introducing the Company and Insolvency Act in September 2015, along with a new model for tax registration that ultimately reduces bureaucracy and a project called Keninvest that allows for individuals looking to open a new business to get a 1-year permit and automatically register them tor their taxing system, as long as they meet the conditions of investing a minimum of US$100,000. By being a British colony, Kenya’s legal system is modeled after Britain’s 2-house parliamentary system with 3 branches: legislative, executive and judicial; within the two houses, National assembly and Senate, they seek representatives for all groups to promote greater equality. That has allowed for many improvements in gender equality and the influence of women inside marriages and households’ decisions to increase significantly in the last 20 years.

However, Kenya is host to many major ethnic issues to this day with forceful eviction of Indigenous people from ancestral land, which then this percentage of the population becomes vulnerable to raiders, sex offenders, wild animals and disease. The whole African continent is also subjected to high internal displacement which causes a lot of refugees, Kenya is the country with the second highest refugee burden with 551,000 thousand people; majority of which are young people migrating to look for better opportunities, which means that these migrations are caused by governments of rising economies that are incapable of generating enough job opportunities and provide for adequate living standards.

Figure 1.0

Governance, Institutions and Ethnic conflicts

Governance in Kenya had some big oscillations in the passing years, demonstrating great improvements in rule of law and government effectiveness, while others decreased or showed no improvement whatsoever. The two most concerning governance indicators are the violence and political stability, along with the ability to control corruption. Kenya tries to manage all these refugees while dealing with skirmishes of ethnic groups which most oftenly lead to small armed conflicts majorly for public dispute in political parties, similarly to what happened in Rwanda, 1994-95, just on a much smaller scale; some techniques used recently in 2022 to prevent post-poll violence was censoring the media and political figures to prevent them from inducing the population to committing violence. Many groups that take part in the conflicts are mostly the indegenous tribes, which also drives the forceful eviction and the use of non-lethal police repression. In some cases, the forceful eviction is done not only to repress these groups, but also used to evict groups that do not partake in violent actions to benefit certain groups with lands rich in minerals and fossil fuel. Even with the creation of a new constitution to increase trust in the government and decrease corruption, back in 2010, corruption still seems unchecked along government branches and institutions. The police force is often perceived as aggressive and known in the country to execute criminals who should have been brought in and then justified with false allegations of self-defense. If taken in comparison to the United States and assume that it is a pattern in first world countries, most governance indicators remain stable; the only outlier for the United States is low ratings in the absence of violence and terrorism presenting violent fluctuations, due to repeated terrorism threats, involvement in wars and high violence in certain areas of the country, such as: Chicago, Detroit, the Bronx et cetera.

Figure 2.0

When looking at Kenya’s Country Policy and Institutions Assessment indicators for Kenya, no outliers have been particularly identified. From 2005 to 2020 most of their policies stand between 3 and 4.5 in a scale from 1 to 6 (by 6 being the ultimate goal), except for 1 presidential period in which land rights and preservation policies fell to 2.5 in 2007 until 2011. Their highest policy rating is in macroeconomic management where it has maintained a stable 4.5 due to a very functional economic management, banking system however has decreased when compared to 2005, as the financial policies are more inefficient than before, even if they peaked at 4, they now place at 3. There are also historical issues regarding Kenya’s legal system as they have always sided more with the employer’s side, oftenly standing with rich classes causing inadequate working conditions, reportedly they have been focusing on developing better labor laws and anti-corruption acts demonstrate a shift in politics since 2015/16.

Figure 3.0

Data Source: The World Bank. World Development Indicators. Annual GDP growth (%) from 1999 - 2020.

For Economic Freedom on the other hand, they all have been pretty stable for both, the United States and Kenya. The United States scored 72.1 and 52.6 for Kenya, the only two indicators that Kenya has scored more than the U.S. are tax burden and government spending. This is an indicator that the U.S. performs better in trade and freedom and provides the population with less liabilities than Kenya does, by the indicators being higher in the two indicators for Kenya actually represents inefficiency rather than good performance. The increasing development and growth and Kenya has not provided them with better Economic Freedom scores, possibly related to the creation of new protection policies.

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